A tactical procedurally generated game in the making

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Pixel art: Heretical vs Legit

When I’ve started thinking about Wizards’ Duel art assets my plan was to reach the best result with the less effort. I’ve spent hours to find the right sequence to process images and texture to obtain a pixelous feeling for background and terrains. As a no-budget project I just wanted to focus on characters and enemies sprites and animations, but last month I realized that a photographic style, with soft color’ scale would be fighting with good quality pixel art. Sure the “hi res on low fi paradox” was guarateed, but the final result was artificial.

Older assets

So I had soon the need to restyle the images processing for get closer to a legit pixel style, and left behind a bit of the starting heresy. The best choice was to give myself more restrictive rules. If tonal scale was too large with a mellow and soft effect I had to cut it to 5 colors only. And sure all the scaling process should have been regular in order to match characters and monsters pixel size. But the most difficult part was to harmonize the colors. I am a professional painter, I can think a color or a palette and make it, but since I had to use the Wizards’ Duel palette I previously made that was extremely hard. 1- Rocks had to be different from the floor, but still give the idea of a cohesive environment. 2- Characters and monsters had to stand out from background without outline, keeping coherence with lights. 3- Given the fact we’ll use particles, I wanted field elements to looks enlighted by characters dynamic lights and spells.

Can you smell the sulfur of torches?

If you compare the first and this last gif you can see a different warm in the light, that’s a simple seamless multiply gradient I thought to insert for give different feeling while walking through the area. I’m happy with this results, still I do not considerate it “final”, and things may evolve once more before the release. But with other ten stages to make after the test dungeon, you know, I want to be sure I have a quick method for everything. Wizards’ Duel is a procedural tactic rpg in the making, and the first dungeon test should be out soon! If you would like to test it please let us know! Let me tell you once more that if you like what we’re doing you can help us with a donation, and give us the boost offering just a coffee or more!

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Wizards of Unica - ALPHA 0.2
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Low-Res Tactic. High Fantasy.
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Wizards of Unica is completely independently developed, by two nice guys who joined together to make their dream of making games come true. Wizards of Unica will be free-to-play: if you like our work, help us to create a bigger, better, harder game!